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Gandalf Grey
Guest
An Unmitigated Disaster: America's $50 billion Domestic Quagmire
By xxdr_zombiexx
Created Dec 31 2007 - 10:22am
What costs more: Global Natural Disasters or America's War on Drugs?
Well...go on... take a guess.
You know the answer but it seems so absurd. It's hard to say it.
That's because it is a study in absurdity.
The world community spent $30 billion for global disasters in 2007 [1].
While losses soared in 2007, the figure was far short of the $99 billion
Munich Re recorded in 2005 - when Hurricane Katrina slammed into New
Orleans.
The world's second-largest reinsurer put total economic losses this year -
which includes losses not covered by insurance - from natural disasters at
$75 billion - a 50 percent increase from last year's $50 billion, but far
below the 2005 figure of $220 billion.
The company said that, in all, 950 natural disasters were recorded this
year - up from 850 last year, and the highest figure since the company
started keeping systematic records in 1974.
That $30 billion represents what was actually covered and paid for. It
appears there was another $45 billion in assessed damage that wasn't paid
for.
That article cites global warming as a very real factor in all this and
indicates this will all only get worse.
Now consider this: America spends $50 billion a year on it's "war on drugs"
alone, $500 billion since the 1970's.
All for nothing.
Paul Armentano, of NORML, writes in Ending America's Domestic Quagmire [2],
that America spends $50 billion a year now on you-know-what.
America now spends nearly $50 billion dollars per year targeting,
prosecuting, and incarcerating illicit-drug users. As a result, the
population of illicit-drug offenders now behind bars is greater than the
entire U.S. prison population in 1980. Since the mid 1990s, drug offenders
have accounted for nearly 50 percent of the total federal prison population
growth and some 40 percent of all state prison population growth. For
marijuana alone, law enforcement currently spends between $ 7 billion and $
10 billion dollars annually targeting users -- primarily low-level
offenders -- and taxpayers spend more than $ 1 billion annually to
incarcerate them.
And a recent journalistic tour de force in Rolling Stone magazine [3] cites
"After Thirty-Five Years and $500 Billion, Drugs Are as Cheap and Plentiful
as Ever: An Anatomy of a Failure."
Even by conservative estimates, the War on Drugs now costs the United
States $50 billion each year and has overcrowded prisons to the breaking
point - all with little discernible impact on the drug trade. A report by
the Government Accountability Office released at the end of September
estimated that ninety percent of the cocaine moving into the United States
now arrives through Mexico, up from sixty-six percent in 2000. Even Walters
acknowledges that for all of the efforts the Bush administration has devoted
to overseas drug enforcement, the price of cocaine has dropped while its
purity has risen. More than forty percent of Americans support legalizing
marijuana, yet the government continues to target pot smokers.
America wasted more money arresting people and putting them in prison than
the world community spent trying to clean up and deal with 950 identified
natural disasters.
Money spent vigorously making people's lives more difficult, rather than
spent on making people's lives LESS difficult.
More from the Rolling Stone article, which talks at length about the failure
of the War on Drugs military-style cocaine interdiction:
Overseas military efforts were the least effective way to decrease drug
use, and imprisoning addicts was prohibitively expensive. The only
cost-effective way to put a dent in the market, it turned out, was drug
treatment. "It's not a magic bullet," says Reuter, the RAND scholar who
helped supervise the study, "but it works." The study ultimately ushered
RAND, this vaguely creepy Cold War relic, into a position as the permanent,
pragmatic left wing of American drug policy, the most consistent force for
innovating and reinventing our national conception of the War on Drugs.
When Everingham's team looked more closely at drug treatment, they found
that thirteen percent of hardcore cocaine users who receive help
substantially reduced their use or kicked the habit completely. They also
found that a larger and larger portion of illegal drugs in the U.S. were
being used by a comparatively small group of hardcore addicts. There was,
the study concluded, a fundamental imbalance: The crack epidemic was
basically a domestic problem, but we had been fighting it more aggressively
overseas. "What we began to realize," says Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at
Carnegie Mellon University who studied drug policy for RAND, "was that even
if you only get a percentage of this small group of heavy drug users to
abstain forever, it's still a really great deal."
People who smoke marijuana are a considerably larger percentage of the
population than "drug addicts" or hard drugs users not otherwise specified.
Law enforcement arrested over 800,000 Americans for pot last year. Is that
not astounding? How can that be "unimportant"?
If you realize that pot smoking isn't the horrible thing the ONDCP and
others wish for you to believe, that all they will ever tell you is hype and
propaganda; if you understand it is far less impactful than tobacco or
alcohol (being non-fatal is one handy measure), and if you add to this
realization that the main consequence of pot smoking is entirely contrived
and artificial - arrest and involvement in America's "justice system" - then
you should be able imagine that pot should not be "illegal".
If marijuana is relegalized, what will law enforcement have to do? The
"pool" of hardcore drug users is dwindling, which is good for us but not so
good for law enforcement budgets. Legal marijuana removes one huge focus of
law enforcement attention (otherwise known as a "distraction").
Now, if you focus all that manpower and money wasted on marijuana n dealing
with the hardcore folks, I suppose they could all be arrested and put in
jail. Or community policing. Something that helps the community.
The legislative and law enforcement approach to "drugs" has been a failure,
if for no other reason than it is fundamentally the incorrect solution to
the problem. Addiction and drug abuse are medical problems first and
foremost.
With the population of hard drugs users, one main issue is that in jail they
still require care and a lot of these people will be high-maintenance and
expensive to keep in prison. Treatment options and availability should be
increased. In the end they need treatment because this is a medical issue
first and foremost. So one way or another the government is going to pay for
treatment for these people.
Which means, legal or illegal, you the tax payer WILL pay for their
treatment, like it or not. I say it's better to fund treatment - make it
part of the coming healthcare overhaul that is long overdue in this country.
For those who gasp or get all addled when this topic surfaces,
relegalization means 2 basic things:
1: It means that cannabis was once legal. And by following the rules of the
Constitution, reformers wish to make it legal again.
2: Relegalization means regulation.
Tobacco and alcohol are the models for rendering dangerous elements legally
available. Regarding specifically tobacco regulation [4]: citing statistics
claiming that slightly more tenth-grade students have smoked pot than
tobacco as evidence that regulation of tobacco works.
Simply put, we have leverage over tobacco sellers that we don't have with
marijuana dealers. Because tobacco retailers and producers are licensed and
regulated, we have some control over them. If they want to keep their
lucrative businesses, cigarette merchants have a strong incentive to follow
the laws -- even laws they don't like.
Consider this: As part of their reaction to the Synar Amendment, tobacco
retailers adopted a "voluntary" program called "We Card." Today, virtually
any store that sells cigarettes posts a large, brightly colored sign saying,
"Under 18, No Tobacco. We Card."
Regulation works. Prohibition deprives authorities of the best tools
available to successfully regulate sales and marketing. Prohibition has
handed the entire, annual $113 billion marijuana industry over to
unregulated criminals, with entirely predictable consequences.
What about the prison industry, though?
Lots of folks are in prison in America.
It's been a growth industy [5]
As of year-end 2006, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported that
American jails and prisons held a record-breaking 2,258,983 men and women,
and that one in 31 adults are now under some form of correctional
supervision. Analysis of the report, released last week by The Sentencing
Project revealed that, since 1980, there has been a 1,200 percent increase
in the number of people incarcerated for the possession or sale of illicit
substances, from 41,100 to at least 532,400 today. At nearly double the rate
of men, the number of women in prison has increased by 812 percent in that
same time period. In October, the Marijuana Policy Project also reported
that marijuana arrests exceeded nearly 830,000 in the same year, resulting
in one pot-related arrest every 38 seconds.
And we are no safer [6].
It's irresponsible.
Democratic Policy
It should be the goal of the Democratic party, since it's going to cast off
the corporate influences and become a party of "the People", to end the "war
on drugs" as it is now known.
The cannabis plant would be relegalized and regulated post haste. This is
one of the few major issues that can be corrected relatively easily, quickly
and cheaply. There is a massive logjam of laws that has to be addressed, but
law enforcement can be ordered to stand down on all cannabis-related matters
and their attention immediately diverted to more pressing issues. (unless we
find we simply have too many...)
A committee would be needed to work on releasing marijuana prisoners from
incarceration.
Effective drug policies would be drafted, including harm-reduction
perspectives and drug-diversion courts for addicts.
All of this can start with Democratic Candidates talking about "the need for
reform", when the issue arises. Because the issue is so highly emotional,
thanks to decades of highly-emotionalized propaganda, real leadership on
this issue will come in the form of Democratic leaders who talk simply and
plainly about the overt failure of drug policy, and lament that change is
needed.
Nearly half of America openly supports changing cannabis laws and doing
something about the out-of-control nature of the current war on drugs.
Democratic leaders should want to tap into that.
We spend more on chasing pot smokers and drug addicts in the US alone than
was spent globally cleaning up from a year of natural disasters. Think what
good could have been done with all that wasted money and human effort. It's
just wrong to work that hard and spend such astronomical sums of money to
make people more miserable than to help make them less miserable.
But then, I am a liberal.
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By xxdr_zombiexx
Created Dec 31 2007 - 10:22am
What costs more: Global Natural Disasters or America's War on Drugs?
Well...go on... take a guess.
You know the answer but it seems so absurd. It's hard to say it.
That's because it is a study in absurdity.
The world community spent $30 billion for global disasters in 2007 [1].
While losses soared in 2007, the figure was far short of the $99 billion
Munich Re recorded in 2005 - when Hurricane Katrina slammed into New
Orleans.
The world's second-largest reinsurer put total economic losses this year -
which includes losses not covered by insurance - from natural disasters at
$75 billion - a 50 percent increase from last year's $50 billion, but far
below the 2005 figure of $220 billion.
The company said that, in all, 950 natural disasters were recorded this
year - up from 850 last year, and the highest figure since the company
started keeping systematic records in 1974.
That $30 billion represents what was actually covered and paid for. It
appears there was another $45 billion in assessed damage that wasn't paid
for.
That article cites global warming as a very real factor in all this and
indicates this will all only get worse.
Now consider this: America spends $50 billion a year on it's "war on drugs"
alone, $500 billion since the 1970's.
All for nothing.
Paul Armentano, of NORML, writes in Ending America's Domestic Quagmire [2],
that America spends $50 billion a year now on you-know-what.
America now spends nearly $50 billion dollars per year targeting,
prosecuting, and incarcerating illicit-drug users. As a result, the
population of illicit-drug offenders now behind bars is greater than the
entire U.S. prison population in 1980. Since the mid 1990s, drug offenders
have accounted for nearly 50 percent of the total federal prison population
growth and some 40 percent of all state prison population growth. For
marijuana alone, law enforcement currently spends between $ 7 billion and $
10 billion dollars annually targeting users -- primarily low-level
offenders -- and taxpayers spend more than $ 1 billion annually to
incarcerate them.
And a recent journalistic tour de force in Rolling Stone magazine [3] cites
"After Thirty-Five Years and $500 Billion, Drugs Are as Cheap and Plentiful
as Ever: An Anatomy of a Failure."
Even by conservative estimates, the War on Drugs now costs the United
States $50 billion each year and has overcrowded prisons to the breaking
point - all with little discernible impact on the drug trade. A report by
the Government Accountability Office released at the end of September
estimated that ninety percent of the cocaine moving into the United States
now arrives through Mexico, up from sixty-six percent in 2000. Even Walters
acknowledges that for all of the efforts the Bush administration has devoted
to overseas drug enforcement, the price of cocaine has dropped while its
purity has risen. More than forty percent of Americans support legalizing
marijuana, yet the government continues to target pot smokers.
America wasted more money arresting people and putting them in prison than
the world community spent trying to clean up and deal with 950 identified
natural disasters.
Money spent vigorously making people's lives more difficult, rather than
spent on making people's lives LESS difficult.
More from the Rolling Stone article, which talks at length about the failure
of the War on Drugs military-style cocaine interdiction:
Overseas military efforts were the least effective way to decrease drug
use, and imprisoning addicts was prohibitively expensive. The only
cost-effective way to put a dent in the market, it turned out, was drug
treatment. "It's not a magic bullet," says Reuter, the RAND scholar who
helped supervise the study, "but it works." The study ultimately ushered
RAND, this vaguely creepy Cold War relic, into a position as the permanent,
pragmatic left wing of American drug policy, the most consistent force for
innovating and reinventing our national conception of the War on Drugs.
When Everingham's team looked more closely at drug treatment, they found
that thirteen percent of hardcore cocaine users who receive help
substantially reduced their use or kicked the habit completely. They also
found that a larger and larger portion of illegal drugs in the U.S. were
being used by a comparatively small group of hardcore addicts. There was,
the study concluded, a fundamental imbalance: The crack epidemic was
basically a domestic problem, but we had been fighting it more aggressively
overseas. "What we began to realize," says Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at
Carnegie Mellon University who studied drug policy for RAND, "was that even
if you only get a percentage of this small group of heavy drug users to
abstain forever, it's still a really great deal."
People who smoke marijuana are a considerably larger percentage of the
population than "drug addicts" or hard drugs users not otherwise specified.
Law enforcement arrested over 800,000 Americans for pot last year. Is that
not astounding? How can that be "unimportant"?
If you realize that pot smoking isn't the horrible thing the ONDCP and
others wish for you to believe, that all they will ever tell you is hype and
propaganda; if you understand it is far less impactful than tobacco or
alcohol (being non-fatal is one handy measure), and if you add to this
realization that the main consequence of pot smoking is entirely contrived
and artificial - arrest and involvement in America's "justice system" - then
you should be able imagine that pot should not be "illegal".
If marijuana is relegalized, what will law enforcement have to do? The
"pool" of hardcore drug users is dwindling, which is good for us but not so
good for law enforcement budgets. Legal marijuana removes one huge focus of
law enforcement attention (otherwise known as a "distraction").
Now, if you focus all that manpower and money wasted on marijuana n dealing
with the hardcore folks, I suppose they could all be arrested and put in
jail. Or community policing. Something that helps the community.
The legislative and law enforcement approach to "drugs" has been a failure,
if for no other reason than it is fundamentally the incorrect solution to
the problem. Addiction and drug abuse are medical problems first and
foremost.
With the population of hard drugs users, one main issue is that in jail they
still require care and a lot of these people will be high-maintenance and
expensive to keep in prison. Treatment options and availability should be
increased. In the end they need treatment because this is a medical issue
first and foremost. So one way or another the government is going to pay for
treatment for these people.
Which means, legal or illegal, you the tax payer WILL pay for their
treatment, like it or not. I say it's better to fund treatment - make it
part of the coming healthcare overhaul that is long overdue in this country.
For those who gasp or get all addled when this topic surfaces,
relegalization means 2 basic things:
1: It means that cannabis was once legal. And by following the rules of the
Constitution, reformers wish to make it legal again.
2: Relegalization means regulation.
Tobacco and alcohol are the models for rendering dangerous elements legally
available. Regarding specifically tobacco regulation [4]: citing statistics
claiming that slightly more tenth-grade students have smoked pot than
tobacco as evidence that regulation of tobacco works.
Simply put, we have leverage over tobacco sellers that we don't have with
marijuana dealers. Because tobacco retailers and producers are licensed and
regulated, we have some control over them. If they want to keep their
lucrative businesses, cigarette merchants have a strong incentive to follow
the laws -- even laws they don't like.
Consider this: As part of their reaction to the Synar Amendment, tobacco
retailers adopted a "voluntary" program called "We Card." Today, virtually
any store that sells cigarettes posts a large, brightly colored sign saying,
"Under 18, No Tobacco. We Card."
Regulation works. Prohibition deprives authorities of the best tools
available to successfully regulate sales and marketing. Prohibition has
handed the entire, annual $113 billion marijuana industry over to
unregulated criminals, with entirely predictable consequences.
What about the prison industry, though?
Lots of folks are in prison in America.
It's been a growth industy [5]
As of year-end 2006, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported that
American jails and prisons held a record-breaking 2,258,983 men and women,
and that one in 31 adults are now under some form of correctional
supervision. Analysis of the report, released last week by The Sentencing
Project revealed that, since 1980, there has been a 1,200 percent increase
in the number of people incarcerated for the possession or sale of illicit
substances, from 41,100 to at least 532,400 today. At nearly double the rate
of men, the number of women in prison has increased by 812 percent in that
same time period. In October, the Marijuana Policy Project also reported
that marijuana arrests exceeded nearly 830,000 in the same year, resulting
in one pot-related arrest every 38 seconds.
And we are no safer [6].
It's irresponsible.
Democratic Policy
It should be the goal of the Democratic party, since it's going to cast off
the corporate influences and become a party of "the People", to end the "war
on drugs" as it is now known.
The cannabis plant would be relegalized and regulated post haste. This is
one of the few major issues that can be corrected relatively easily, quickly
and cheaply. There is a massive logjam of laws that has to be addressed, but
law enforcement can be ordered to stand down on all cannabis-related matters
and their attention immediately diverted to more pressing issues. (unless we
find we simply have too many...)
A committee would be needed to work on releasing marijuana prisoners from
incarceration.
Effective drug policies would be drafted, including harm-reduction
perspectives and drug-diversion courts for addicts.
All of this can start with Democratic Candidates talking about "the need for
reform", when the issue arises. Because the issue is so highly emotional,
thanks to decades of highly-emotionalized propaganda, real leadership on
this issue will come in the form of Democratic leaders who talk simply and
plainly about the overt failure of drug policy, and lament that change is
needed.
Nearly half of America openly supports changing cannabis laws and doing
something about the out-of-control nature of the current war on drugs.
Democratic leaders should want to tap into that.
We spend more on chasing pot smokers and drug addicts in the US alone than
was spent globally cleaning up from a year of natural disasters. Think what
good could have been done with all that wasted money and human effort. It's
just wrong to work that hard and spend such astronomical sums of money to
make people more miserable than to help make them less miserable.
But then, I am a liberal.
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson